In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Larry Wall) wrote:
>Maybe type parameters are just subscripts? [...]
> my Fight %fight does key{Dog;Cat};
I like that.
>But if English-like is the criterion that'd still read better as
> my Fight %fight has key{Dog;Cat};
I like that even better.
>Maybe "has" and "does" are just synonyms, and you can use
>whatever makes more grammatical sense. But pretty much every time
>I've introduced synonyms into Perl I've come to regret it. But hey,
>if I introduce *different* synonyms this time, does that count as
>making a new mistake?
=) Isn't "synonym" just Greek for TMTOWTDI?
To me, role-"has" seems different enough from attribute-"has" that
the context would make it pretty clear which was meant. (But maybe
I'm just missing something subtle. Or else something blatant.)
>The problem with a thesaurus is that it only gives you synonyms, not the
>word you really want. :-)
Heh. Sometimes I know the word I want, I just don't know I know it
until the thesaurus reminds me. And the rest of the time I just like
looking through all the words. As often as not, something on the
opposite page catches my eye and I end up forgetting what I was
looking for in the first place.
>Well, there's always "domain" and "range", if we want to be mathematical.
I'm happy with those too (perhaps because I do want to be a bit
mathematical).
>Or we we wanted to be NASAesque, they'd be FATs, for Formal Argument Types.
"is FAT"? Yeah, that works for me too. =)
>Well, I just put "is shape" because that's what the PDLers settled on,
>but as far as I'm concerned linguistically, it could just be "is dim".
>That would settle the "make-it-like-English" question by making it
>not at all like English.
>On the aesthetic hand, "shape" is a much prettier word than "dim".
I would take that as an abbreviation and read it as "is dimensioned",
which is English-like enough for me. It's also short. And I don't
mind calling it dim, because if it were so smart, I wouldn't have to
tell it what to do in the first place. But "shape" *is* prettier.
-David "pondering the shape of things to come" Green
